The name giFT (giFT Internet File Transfer) is a so-called recursive acronym, which means that it refers to itself in the expression for which it stands.

One of the biggest drawbacks of the giFT engine is that it currently lacks Unicode support, which prevents sharing files with Unicode characters in their file names (such as "ø","ä", "å", "é" etc.).[citation needed] Also, giFT lacks many features needed to use the gnutella network effectively.

Note: OpenFT has previously had its own article, therefore OpenFT redirects here. To see the articles in other languages, just click the previous link and choose from the side menu.

The Apollon front end

giFT's sibling project is OpenFT, a peer-to-peer file sharing network protocol that has a structure in which nodes are divided into 'search' nodes and 'index' supernodes in addition to common nodes. Since both projects are related very closely, when one says 'OpenFT', one can mean either one of two different things: the OpenFT protocol, or the implementation in the form of a plugin for giFT.

The name "OpenFT" stands for "Open FastTrack". Despite this, the OpenFT protocol is an entirely new protocol design: only a few ideas in the OpenFT protocol are drawn from what little was known about the FastTrack protocol at the time OpenFT was designed.

Like FastTrack and Napster, OpenFT is a network where nodes submit lists of shared files to other nodes to keep track of which files are available on the network. This reduces the bandwidth consumed from search requests at the price of additional memory and processing power on the nodes that store that information. The transmission of shared lists is not fully recursive: a node will only transmit its list of shared files to a single search node randomly chosen as that node's "parent", and the list of those files will not be further transmitted to other nodes.[3]

OpenFT is also similar to the gnutella network in that search requests are recursively forwarded in between the nodes that keep track of the shared files.

There are three different kinds of nodes on the OpenFT network:

USER

Most nodes are USER nodes; these don't have any special function.

SEARCH

These nodes handle search requests; they search the filelists their CHILD nodes (explained below) submit to them. These nodes must have a capable Internet connection and at least 128M RAM. A modern processor is highly recommended as well.[4]

INDEX

Nodes with fast connections and lots of memory can be INDEX nodes, which keep lists of available search nodes, collect statistics, and try to maintain the structure of the network.[5]

A node can be both a SEARCH and an INDEX node. USER nodes will pick three SEARCH nodes to be their PARENT nodes. They will submit their shares list to them if the PARENT accepts the USER as its CHILD. By default, SEARCH nodes will be PARENTS for a maximum of 500 CHILD nodes.

Originally, included the giFT-FastTrack plugin, to connect to Kazaa and Kazaa Lite. In Version 0.12 and later he removed the giFT-FastTrack plug-in in order to avoid a legal fight with Sharman Networks. The FastTrack plug-in is still being developed and is available from a third-party website. Upgrading from previous versions of the program will not remove the giFT-FastTrack plug-in.

Search nodes handle search requests. They search the filelists their CHILD (common) nodes submitted to them. These nodes must have a capable Internet connection and at least 128M RAM. A modern processor is highly recommended as well.

Marcus Bergner, FastTrack chapter in his MS Thesis "Improving Performance of Modern Peer-to-peer Services", 10 June 2003, Umea University, chapter "discusses the FastTrack protocol used by the KaZaA family of file sharing applications. Since the protocol is a well kept secret most discussions will relate to the giFT project, an open source implementation attempting to provide similar capabilities."